I hadn't seen this mentioned here. His Mises Institute talks affected my view on many aspects of world affairs. Kind of wished he was my grandpa.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/great-ralph-raico/

The Great Ralph Raico . . .
Thomas DiLorenzo
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. . . has passed away. Rest in Peace old friend. David Gordon has written on this blog of what a great, inspirational scholar Ralph was. Ralph wrote his doctoral dissertation under F.A. Hayek at the University of Chicago and was our preeminent expert on the history of classical liberalism in the European tradition. A generation of Mises University students were blessed with being able to attend Ralph’s lectures on the subject, which are thankfully archived at www.mises.org. and are therefore available to the world for all time. Every scholar with an interest in classical liberalism and the work of the Mises Institute (and this Web site) is obligated to find a way to show these lectures to all of his students now that the cultural Marxist barbarians have taken over the universities. If they’ve never heard of the arguments in favor of liberty they will be more easily sucked into the propaganda of socialist tyranny that passes for “higher education” today.

Ralph became associated with the Mises Institute for the same reason that so many others, including myself, did, namely, its unapologetic pursuit of the truth, wherever it may lead you, and its project of speaking truth to power. Ralph and I were both unceremoniously dumped from the Cato Institute’s list of “adjunct scholars” at the same time many years ago after it was apparent that we were Misesians and worse yet, Rothbardians (Murray Rothbard was one of Ralph’s closest lifelong friends). This was fine with me for at the time, after publishing several of my books and numerous articles, Cato had begun editing the articles I was sending them to sound as though they were written by congressional staffers instead of a libertarian economist. Their modus operandi had become kissing-up-to-power under the ludicrously false assumption that they could influence the Washington establishment rather than the other way around.

I knew Ralph before he became associated with the Mises Institute, but the first time I can recall that he gave a presentation at a Mises Institute conference was at one of the very first Austrian Scholars conferences. In that speech he quoted Ludwig von Mises as having reservations about an open borders immigration policy, not at all much different from the anti-open borders position taken by Militon Friedman, Gary Becker, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and other free-market luminaries who believe(d) that open borders are incompatible with a welfare state.

Ralph’s comments on immigration caused Larry White and one or two of the other Koch-Foundation-associated economists in attendance to storm out of the room in a fit of political correctness as though their hair was on fire, never to return. I recall thinking at the time, no wonder some people smear the Austrian School as a “cult.”

Ralph’s scholarly dismantling of Churchill caused similar reactions by warmongering Churchill worshippers, and I’ve observed people becoming absolutely hysterical over Ralph’s suggestion that incinerating hundreds of thousands of Japanese women and children in Nagasaki and Hiroshima was not exactly America’s proudest hour. None of this deterred Ralph from his lifelong practice of using his brilliant mind to speak truth to power.

One of Ralph’s most impressive intellectual feats was that he apparently memorized the entire dialogue from The Godfather. You wouldn’t understand; it’s an Italian thing.

10:14 am on December 14, 2016

helmuth_hubener

12-23-2016, 11:07 AM

I hadn't seen this mentioned here. His Mises Institute talks affected my view on many aspects of world affairs. Kind of wished he was my grandpa.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/great-ralph-raico/

One of the best lecture series in history. And on history.

https://mises.org/library/history-struggle-liberty

Very stimulating. If you've got a long car trip this Christmas.... get it.

I am sad because, as far as I know, he never did finish the book he mentions in these lectures that he was working on. Or did he and I just missed it?